The Longest Speech Says the Least: Cory Booker's Fake Filibuster

Booker’s 24-hour floor speech was not about halting harm. It was about constructing an image. The performance became the message.

Senator Cory Booker spoke for over 24 hours straight — a historic marathon of words that many media outlets immediately heralded as a sign of political revival, resistance, and moral courage. “Finally, some fire,” said The New York Times. “A stunt that worked,” said Bloomberg. Pundits praised his energy, commitment, stamina and “moxie”.

But we’re not clapping.

Because this wasn’t a filibuster to halt a bill, it wasn’t a bold act of legislative resistance. It wasn’t even a formal filibuster — no legislation or nomination was being blocked. What it did do was keep the Senate floor open through the night, requiring Capitol Police and staff to remain on duty. When Booker finally yielded the floor, the Senate moved on — quickly confirming Trump’s NATO ambassador nominee Matthew Whitaker.

We’ve been here before — watching politics turn into performance, not policy. Booker’s speech broke Strom Thurmond’s record for the longest Senate speech — a symbolic irony, considering Thurmond’s was an act of racist obstruction against the Civil Rights Act, now eclipsed by a Black senator using the same tactic… but for what?

The Spectacle of “Moral Moments”

Booker declared this was a “moral moment.” He claimed he’d keep speaking “as long as I am physically able.” He invoked Martin Luther King Jr. and the moral arc of the universe. At hour 10, he touched on immigration, calling Trump’s policies “dangerous,” saying they undermine both public safety and constitutional rights.

Cory Booker’s speech on immigration rang hollow. Many of us have watched the Democratic Party repeatedly fail to challenge the violent machinery targeting Black and Brown communities — communities surveilled, detained by ICE, and deported with little resistance.

But this isn’t new. Going after immigrant and marginalised communities has long been a non-partisan agenda in the U.S. From Hillary to Kamala to now Booker, the playbook stays the same: a “stronger border” is sold as safety, while the rhetoric behind it fuels mass detention, deportation, and the criminalisation of dissent. This is not just policy — it’s performance. And the price is paid by the very communities they claim to protect.

Karim Daoud showed up at a Newark immigration office on March 12, expecting nothing more than a routine appointment to renew his work authorisation. Instead, he was detained by ICE and never came home—a father. A member of the very community Cory Booker claims to represent. Many had brought Karim’s case to his office. The national spotlight was his — and yet, he said nothing.

Nineteen hours into his speech, Booker declared Hineni — I am here. He pinned on a “Release the Hostages” button and named Edan Alexander, an Israeli-American soldier from New Jersey held in Gaza. And still, Booker did not speak Karim’s name. Not a word for his constituent sitting in ICE detention. Not a word on Gaza, of the thousands of Palestinians massacred in the last two years.

By the time Booker was racing toward his finish line, the world already knew—medical workers shot and killed, their bodies dumped into mass graves in Gaza, and children massacred on Eid. These weren’t whispers—they were documented, public, undeniable. The atrocities were real, unfolding, and impossible to ignore. And yet, for the last 18 months, as protesters filled the streets calling this a “moral moment” to stand against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, Booker chose complicity. He voted to send more bombs: $14 billion in weapons funding to Israel, smiled in photos with indicted war criminal Yoav Gallant even after ICC warrants against him, and pocketed $870,000 from AIPAC.

This isn’t new. In 2019, Booker backed anti-BDS legislation, helping criminalise boycotts of Israel — a blatant attack on free speech. That same year, at AIPAC, he invoked scripture: “If I forget thee, O Israel, may I cut off my right hand.” And now, during a speech about democracy donning a pro-Israel hostage pin, he railed against antisemitism, lauded the Abraham Accords and did not mention Gaza once.

Booker’s 24-hour floor speech was not about halting harm. It was about constructing an image. The performance became the message. And in that performance, we are invited not to act but to watch. To share. To clap. And then to forget. It is a grotesque moment in which human agency is not only sidelined but wholly erased. In its place, we are given a false sense of participation, a moral afterglow with no substance. The people who need protection become invisible; their stories are drowned beneath performance optics.

Performative Politics Isn’t Resistance

Democrats have perfected the art of performance:

• The kente cloth kneel.

• The 2016 gun control sit-in led to nothing.

• The endless speeches, tweets, tears at the border, and town halls that serve as substitutes for action.

But our conditions don’t change with speeches. They change with courage: the kind that disrupts systems, not just Senate schedules. Real resistance doesn’t look like marathon speeches for media clips. It looks like showing up — for Karim, for Gaza, for the detained, disappeared, and silenced. Real resistance means policy, not televised performance. Legislation, not like. Risk, not rehearsed outrage.

Booker’s Record Speaks Louder Than His Rhetoric

The problem here isn’t just Booker; it’s the Democratic Party. A party that has not only remained complicit but actively enabled the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. Time and again, they have affirmed the mythological framework of Israel’s “right to self-defence” — a legal fiction with no basis in international humanitarian law — while ignoring the wholesale erasure of Palestinian life, dignity, and sovereignty.

This is not just moral cowardice. It’s a systemic refusal to recognise Palestinian personhood. And in the performance of liberal outrage, the silence on Gaza reveals everything.

Real Change Requires More Than a Mic

But the problem isn’t just Cory Booker. The problem is not just accountability. The problem is the institutions that uphold power without consequence. When the Democratic Party made it clear that genocide was not a red line—but instead enthusiastically aided and abetted it, provided cover for violence against our students, and justified attacks on institutions—how are we supposed to trust these same people to defend American democracy? You can’t cheerlead state violence one day and claim to safeguard democratic values the next.